Searching for Hassan: A Journey to the Heart of Iran

Preface

Many moons have passed since the first edition of this book. When I put pen to paper, I hoped to shed light on a beguiling culture and people that Western media had widely demonized since 1979—the year of the Iranian Revolution. In narrating this chronicle, I delved into the country’s millennial history and culture, citing those timeless poets who so often spoke truth to power over the ages.

Iran means many things to many people. For most Americans, the hostage crisis remains a fixed obsession, an open wound. Forty years later, this event still shapes views from Washington.

Yet, here in Florence where I live, people speak differently about Iran. One often hears the words l’antica Persia, ancient Persia, mentioned in the same breath with Cyrus the Great and mythic Persepolis. Here, people talk about Isfahan and its turquoise cupolas, gardens, cypresses and fountains. They know that three Zoroastrian high priests crossed deserts from Iran to find the young Messiah and how this epiphany served as a potent symbol for Cosimo de’ Medici and Renaissance artists to evoke the wisdom and wealth of the East. Florentines will also remind you that Isfahan is a twin city with their adored Firenze. And enthusiastic cineasts will tell you that Iran boasts one of the world’s most important film industries, heavily influenced by Italian neo-realist cinema.

Yes, there are strong similarities between Italy and Iran. Both countries are blessed with a proud past and a problematic present. Both bear the heavy weight of clergies, mafias and corrupt politicians, while possessing immense architectural treasures and artistic legacies. As Italian culture civilized Europe, Iranian culture illuminated the Middle East and Central Asia. Enough to know that Persian was the official court language of both the Ottoman and Mughal empires.

What to do, then, with the simplistic and darkly myopic view that many Americans hold of the people of Iran? Perhaps Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi explains it best: For Americans, it is not attractive to hear what the similarities are between them and the Iranian people. It is attractive to hear how different the Iranians are.

Not surprisingly, adrenaline-driven media across the United States has kept fear-based clichés fixed in place. Anyone who presents a nuanced reality runs the risk of walking across a minefield. But, then again, I was not raised in America. I grew up in the foothills of Tehran. So, my view is personal—formed through direct experience.

Across the West, borders have been closing. Walls are being erected. International treaties broken. Nuclear agreements dismissed. Sanctions and travel bans imposed, even for artists. Donald Trump has capitalized on this zeitgeist by stoking fears of immigrants, feeding Islamophobia and fueling nationalist sentiment in Europe and America. Populists are forging a much more dangerous world.

Tense relations between the United States and Iran have blared loudly across the news cycles. America now stands at the precipice and can secure an elusive peace, or stumble into yet another ruinous Middle Eastern conflict. Recent history shows that U.S. leaders are extremely capable of starting wars but quite incompetent at ending them. With Biden’s election and Trump’s rejection, the world breathed easier. We must be hopeful, yet very wary.

Thankfully, there are those who believe that these political divisions can be bridged though culture and art. Congressman Lee Hamilton, former chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs once asked me to speak at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in D.C. Politics today is so emotional, he said, that serious debate is in danger of being drowned out by hysteria. What people need now are personal stories. Stories that resonate and show the way. In this light, our quixotic journey in search for a lost friend becomes far more meaningful.

Author Gelareh Asayesh describes in the Washington Post: The trip back to Iran proves to be a new beginning in the saga of the Wards and Ghasemis. Something very unusual happened in that Persian garden many years ago: the family of an American Christian oil company executive and the family of an Iranian Muslim cook became one. And if they were able to bridge the great divide, perhaps there is hope for us all.

Since the revolution in 1979, a dramatic pendulum has swung back and forth in Iran between euphoric hope and deep despair. Moderates and reformists have seen their fortunes rise and fall. Hardliners have held and lost power and then seized it again. Openings to the outside world have been followed by sudden closures. Times of conflict have given way to peace, only to erupt again. Yet art continued to be created along with literature and film under high duress and against all odds. Each year, young Iranians seeking a better future chose to go abroad, while overseas some have been drawn to return. And the diaspora followed their country’s hopes and dramas with rapt attention via family members in Iran and online news.

All these events have occurred in cycles similar to the seasons when the heat of summer gives way to the melancholy rains of autumn, when the bleak snows of winter give way to the burst of spring and re-birth of Nowruz, the Persian New Year.

Listen to the poets, Hassan often told us. Through their words, we transcend tragedies. It is important to remember that the great Rumi—a bestselling poet in America—wrote his miraculous works when the horrors of Genghis Khan and his invading Mongol hordes forced him to flee west as a refugee until settling in Konya, Turkey. The treasured poet Hafez also penned his enduring Divan in the wake of Tamerlane’s slaughter across the Iranian plateau that devastated Isfahan and threatened his own city of Shiraz.

Both poets witnessed hell on earth. Yet, they did not dwell on the nightmares that befell their country. Instead, they focused on the potential divine light that burns within. And they left with us their luminous gifts to help us walk through our own epoch of darkness.

Near the classical amphitheater of Epidaurus in Greece, long underground tunnels were once used to cure mental illness. The afflicted ancients wandered through this labyrinth in full darkness until they finally reached the center, where suddenly they faced a single beam of sunlight spilling down onto the earth floor. Confronting this luminous ray at the end of their spiritual ordeal provoked catharsis, quieting inner demons, bringing peace.

Two millennia later, Caravaggio dramatically illuminated his religious scenes with similar streaks of divine light. His unique vision sparked an artistic revolution.

Moments of illumination were also honored in the Persian tradition, first by the prophet Zoroaster and later by the Sufi poets who equated spiritual awakening with the nocturnal image of a moth drawn to a flame, or the first glimmer of dawn.

One question I am often asked: What was it that led two aging parents and their four sons to return to a distant country where they had lived for ten years? Grit and resilience, coupled with memories that marked them for life.

Quite simply, we went back chasing light.

Prologue

Blood from Pomegranates

Where am I? That’s my first question.

—SAMUEL BECKETT, THE UNNAMABLE

I remember a brisk evening long ago. Fires glow red across the city’s roofline. Explosions of firecrackers break the spring silence. It is March 1963, the last Tuesday night before Nowruz, the Iranian New Year. Snowmelt surges down alpine ravines. Hyacinths pierce through wet clay. Budding plane trees greet the warming season. For two thousand five hundred years Iranian astronomers have scanned the heavens for the sign. When the sun crosses the equator, a fresh year rises, heralding the first day of spring.

Chaharshanbe Souri, the Zoroastrian fire festival, echoes with all-night drumming and chanting. Piles of leaves, broken twigs and branches line the street. Moonlight washes over snowcapped mountains. A breeze blows through our Persian garden. Hassan prepares us for the ceremony. Brushing back our hair, he repeats Farsi phrases. Tonight, he says, we will leap over bonfires.

Older than Islam, this festival is interwoven with Zoroaster’s sacred flame. Sins collected over the year are burned away under the night skies. Just leap. And you become clean.

Celebrations start at twilight. Hassan, our housekeeper, our cook, our young Persian father, emerges from the shadows, swaying a glowing Coleman lantern and twitching his proud mustache. With the physique of a gymnast, he moves fluidly. His strong chin juts out with dramatic effect. He strides toward us, eyes flickering under the streetlamps. He bears the quiet nobility of an actor taking the stage.

My three brothers, Chris, Rich, Kev, and I watch mesmerized as he reaches down and sets each dormant pile alight. Before us, seven bonfires rage along our narrow street, grandly named the Alley of the Brave. An odd number for good luck. The flames crackle in the darkness, illuminating the mud-and-brick walls that line the alley. Neighborhood friends assemble, twittering nervously before the bright corridor of light.

Our runway is marked by the hypnotic dance of the fires. Hassan pats my head. "Be careful pesar, little boy. Don’t slip like last year. Slowly, he starts chanting, Sorkhi-ye to az man o zardiye man az to. Give me your healthy red glow and take away my sickly color. These will be our words for the fire. Sorkhi-ye to az man…," we repeat. My older brother, Kevin, impulsively pushes forward. Curly-haired Chris stands ready; little bow-legged Richard holds his hand, eyes wide open.

One by one, children of the neighborhood, their grandparents and the young men gather up courage as they move toward the bonfires. Shouts and laughter erupt. Songs and dancing break out, sudden blasts of firecrackers thrown by mischievous kids send mothers into squeals of fright. The jumping is about to begin.

Hassan, curling his eyebrow, gives me a quick wink with boyish delight. This is his sign! Loud yelps fill the air as we all scamper toward the blazing pyres with our adrenaline surging. Fatimeh, Hassan’s wife, and the neighborhood women swarm like moths around the flames, clapping. I chase Hassan toward the burning bonfires. My three brothers trail close behind. My heart is pounding, my ears ringing. Then, in a startling moment, I see Hassan soar and vanish in the blinding light. "Sorkhi-ye to az man…" I inhale and jump too.

Sizzling branches, scorched leaves, wafts of smoke. Heat sears my bony knees. I smell singed hair. My feet hit the earth again, still churning. I open my eyes. In the darkness I see Hassan’s silhouette. Again he disappears into a blazing wall. I jump. Flames lick at my legs. I mustn’t lose him. Another fire, another breath. Again.

In the garden of our Tehran home, Rich, Chris and I sit with Fatimeh and her children, Ali and baby Mahdi, and a brood of newly born puppies.

In the dream, somewhere on Tehran’s high plateau, under the rugged Elburz peaks and a dizzying canopy of stars, I chase after Hassan’s vanishing heels. Across chessboard squares of darkness and light, I run with my brothers in hot pursuit long into the night as the sacred flame washes over me.

Leaping over fire always marks the first act of this magical eve. As the flames die down, we all scurry back inside our gate and Fatimeh quickly dresses us in black shroud costumes. Hassan hands me a copper soup ladle. Out on the verandah, my father casts an approving glance at our commotion, lifting his eyes from his book, puffing on a pipe. He beckons to me. Jazz tunes float around us in the evening air, mixing with classical Persian santur and tar music drifting over the vine-covered wall from a garden party next door. Out into the night pours Louis Armstrong’s silky gravel voice in When It’s Sleepy Time Down South, followed by Leonard Bernstein’s hit musical of gritty rhythms from Manhattan’s West Side.

Back in the kitchen, Hassan counsels my brothers and gives Chris a spoon. Now you must pray to God. It is time for spoon-hitting. Go to the houses around the neighborhood and bang on your bowl. If somebody gives you something, it means that God will also give. But if nobody gives you anything, then God will give you nothing.

He tells me to put a key in my shoe. Stumbling out in the dark, we head for the alley again. Our red gate swings open and we creep under the lamplight up to a neighbor’s wrought-iron door. Chris nervously presses the bell. We bang on our empty bowls with our spoons. Copper on iron rings loudly. When the door opens, we quickly cover our faces and thrust our bowls forward. My face is hidden, yet through the black veil I watch an elegant long hand with gold rings reach out in a clenched fist.

In that hand lies the prophecy. If empty, all wishes are lost. Then it opens, and with God’s blessing, ajeel—assorted nuts, seeds and dried fruits—drop into our bowls like promises for the New Year. We run home thrilled, but I remember there is one more thing to do.

Stopping before the gate, I hang back in the shadows of the alley, feeling the sharp teeth of Hassan’s key in my shoe. The night air is still. Now I must listen to those who pass by, as Hassan said. An older couple shuffles home and I overhear their words: Praise God. She and Ahmad will be well together. With that cryptic message, I slip through the gate and rush up the drive to Hassan for its decoding. Interpretation is always left to elders.

"Well, Terry ghermez—he calls me Red for my hair—these parents were speaking about their daughter and her beloved. This is a good sign. You’ve been a good boy, God is telling you."

Hassan asks me what I have wished for. Shyly, I stumble and speak of Sara and my hope that she’ll be in my class next year.

Your wish for Sara will be granted.

On each day of the two-week New Year’s festival, Hassan initiates us with equal passion. On the actual day of Nowruz, he invites us to his red-brick home, which faces the cherry orchard, for chai o shirini, tea and cookies. We exchange small gifts, and he explains the meaning of haft sin, the seven offerings—green sprouts, apple, garlic, vinegar, sumac, wild olive and a dish called samanoo—that adorn his table. The sprouting wheat grass wrapped with red ribbon symbolizes new growth, while the garlic is meant to keep away bad omens. A candle burns brightly next to his holy Koran, and a mirror reflects its light. A sour orange floating in a bowl of water, he tells us, is our Earth floating in the cosmos.

During that festive fortnight, as my father sits on the porch with his nightly glass of Shiraz wine, Hassan counsels him: If you’re drinking wine, Mr. Ward, you might as well throw some in the garden for the spirits. Then they see you’re not selfish, that you’re willing to share. It purifies your act. You know, it’s good to do that.

After he leaves, I watch my dad look twice over his shoulder, then splash some red wine into the bed of roses below, before filling his glass again.

On the morning of Sizdeh Bidar, the thirteenth day of Nowruz, Hassan says to my mother, Your family can’t stay here today. Impossible. My mother asks him to explain. To stay indoors is a bad omen, he insists. We must go to the countryside and throw all bad things of the past away. Nature will take care of them. They’ll become wind, trees, rivers and blossoms.

So together we join the entire city in the search for a spot of green where we can lay down our picnic blanket, samovar and rice, and spend the day with nature. Walking to the nearby stream, Hassan carefully places the green sprouts in the rushing water. With that final ritual, the days of Nowruz come to a close, and life returns to normal.

Spring gives way to summer. When the sun’s suffocating heat falls over Tehran like a thick wool blanket and melts the asphalt into soft pools of black gelatin, the people abandon their brick homes.

From tonight, we will sleep under the stars, Hassan announces. We drag our beds out onto the verandah, into the sweet breath of night, and a whole new cycle begins. During these months it never rains. All the bedding goes outdoors—mattresses, blankets, pillows and sheets—and when the light fades in the west and trembling stars begin spinning across the heavens, Hassan arrives with his lamp and his treasure chest of stories: King Solomon’s ring; Moses and the shepherd; parables of holy Ali; Jesus and the donkey; passages from the Koran; poems by Hafez; and tales from Hazar Afsane, composed for Humai, the daughter of Bahram, the legendary ancient king of Persia. Each evening, we boys gather under the cool night skies with unbridled excitement, never knowing where we will set sail. Each night is hopeful, even in defeat.

A princess can fall in love with a common boy. God will open the heavens and speak. A hidden hand shall direct our path. Lovers take the stage: Leili and Majnoon, Shirin and Farhad. Each new night reveals a secret, a truth. The mythical bird Simorgh awaits us. As we listen, Chris, Rich and I watch Hassan’s impish eyes glisten. Struck with surprise as his saga unfolds, we are also hypnotized by his enthusiasm. With a talent for mimicry, he imitates expressions, gestures and gaits of people, deftly slipping into the skins of colorful characters in his pageant of morality tales. Thieves, grand viziers, prophets, street urchins, princesses, fishermen, barbers, con artists, vagabonds, warriors and fortune-tellers all come alive.

Lying on his back, Kevin, the dreamer, gazes up at the moon’s pale white mountains and shaded Sea of Tranquility. Some nights he uses our telescope. As each story unfolds, we imagine the geography: castles in the clouds, ruby-filled tombs, windswept monasteries, night caravans, alchemists’ studios. When the tale-weaving stretches too late and little Richard nods off to sleep, Hassan pauses. In that time of silence, as slumber sets in, he slowly draws away, leaving us with the burping frogs, buzzing crickets and blowing wind. Like Scheherazade, he keeps us waiting until the next night to complete the tale. Somewhere out there, we know, a princess is falling in love with a brave farmer, another will run off with a young mariner. Hope, Hassan tells us, there is always hope.

Our household staff grew to embrace not only Hassan and Fatimeh but also her mother, Khorshid, who took care of Fatimeh’s two children, Ali and Mahdi. And then there was Hassan’s brother, Mohammad. Just discharged from the army for overturning a jeep, he was out of work. So he became our driver. Although we generally rode in the back seat while he negotiated traffic, we had to hold on tightly to avoid being vaulted into the windshield by his sudden braking. Once Hassan asked my mother to go to the police station in his brother’s place when an infraction was traced to our car. Hassan rightly feared his brother’s license might be in jeopardy if Mohammad appeared before the police. In his gentle and humorous way, Hassan ruled our lives.

Although officially he managed our household, Hassan was for us much more than that. Like Virgil, he guided us through the labyrinths of dimly lit bazaars and lovingly taught us all the customs needed to ease our way into his culture. He became an important part of our family, feeding our imaginations, enlarging our world. Stocky and strong, with his splendid black mustache, he offered his folk wisdom with a deft wit. In the absence of television, he gave us the comic antics of the confounding Mullah Nasruddin, presenting life’s dilemmas and wise solutions in a hilarious way. In his eye, a spark was always lit.

We longed for the moment when Hassan would call us to see the musicians and Haji Firouz black-faced clowns who appeared dancing at our gate just before New Year, amid feasting and gifts. My brothers and I chattered away in our broken street-Farsi and danced to Iranian pop music. As the seasons changed, so did our frantic occupations: buying silkworms in mulberry groves, riding the grumpy mules of passing nomads, trekking up poplar- lined river gorges, playing hide-and-seek in hollowed-out caves outside our back wall, skiing in the high snows of Shemshak, wandering deep into treasure-filled bazaars, licking saffron-flavored ice cream under thick shade trees and dressing up for the U.N. festival at our polyglot Community School.

On the Fourth of July, we would lie outstretched on our blankets and gaze at the booming fireworks exploding above the great lawn of the U.S. embassy. We had heard only faint rumors about a giant called Willie Mays and the mythical Central Park. We were oblivious of distant America. For us children, Iran, not the United States, was home.

Describing her passage back to Ireland in A Book of Migrations, Rebecca Solnit writes poignantly about the meaning of home in one’s memory. Home, the site of all childhood’s revelations and sufferings, changes irrevocably, so that we are all in some sense refugees from a lost world. But, she goes on to say, you can’t ever leave home either; it takes root inside you and the very idea of self as an entity bounded by the borders of the skin is a fiction disguising the vast geographies contained under the skin that will never let you go.

For my family, after ten years it all came to an abrupt end. Our decision to leave Iran and return to the States was reluctantly agreed upon after Kevin, separated from the family for the first time, found only misery at Deerfield Academy, a prep school in New England. He described it as being like Lord of the Flies. I was scheduled to leave for the same boarding school the following September. My parents couldn’t bear the idea of casting their four boys to the winds. Our family would remain united, they decided. And so we left Iran.

Sadness and confusion clouded our last days in Tehran as we packed up our lives into boxes, walked under pergolas and mulberry trees in a haze, bit into Hassan’s last supper of chelo kebab, fighting back the tears. My mother had found someone to take over our rented villa. He vowed to treat Hassan Ghasemi and his family with respect and pay them well.

We stood somberly outside our gate to say our goodbyes. Strangely, it was July 4. Hassan and Fatimeh hugged us all while we made solemn promises to stay in touch. He pulled my ear one last time, telling me to respect mother and father. Choked up, I nodded my promise. He countered with a contented wink. Young Fatimeh reached out and took my mother’s hand in hers. The two women held each other closely. Time slowed for that long farewell. Then we heard the beeping horn.

As the taxi pulled away, our last sight out of the rear window was of Hassan, Fatimeh, baby Maryam, little Ali and Mahdi, grandmother Khorshid and Mohammad, clustered together, waving sadly at the red gate.

Once in America, my mother wrote to Hassan and Fatimeh. She waited. Finally, an airmail letter arrived bearing news from her friend Elie Dugan, with red stamps bearing the Shah’s portrait.

Dear Donna,

Hectic always seems to be the way in Tehran and this fall is no exception. I know that news about your family is what’s most important for all of you. I spoke to them before the new tenants moved in and at the time Hassan and Fatimeh said they did not think they could work for anyone but Mrs. Ward.

I urged them to give the new people a chance. About three weeks later, Mrs. G. was at home in the villa, with workmen all about. Hassan had stayed on for a month to get her started and was marvelous, and she said she cannot find anyone else like him and so on. But, she understood that they wanted to leave, and Fatimeh apparently said she never did like Tehran, etc. I said nothing.

From what I can put together they have bought a truck with Mohammad, and left Tehran. Hassan and M will be truckers? So it goes. But don’t be upset. You did so much for the family and they no doubt learned the Ward esprit and that, after all, is all anyone can do…

That letter seared like a hot iron. Written by my mother’s dear friend Elie Dugan, who helped her pack in our final days, these words announced the unimaginable. My mother was distraught. How will we ever find them?

Hassan had told her that he would stay at the house for years to come. She hadn’t expected the Ghasemis to leave. At least not so soon. And despite the letter’s warm spirit, her friend never thought to ask Hassan for his new address. Or to send it to us.

My mother faintly remembered his village’s name: Toodesht, she thought it was. Soon, telephoning and writing letters, she enlisted Tehrani friends in the search. Al Gross, the director of the Bank of America in the capital, told her that no one on his staff had ever heard of any village by that name. Our friends the Farmanfarmaians wrote diplomatically of the daunting task of locating Hassan with such sketchy information. Other responses came back. The village Toodesht? It didn’t exist.

So what began as a small break in contact grew into a chasm. The Ghasemis had vanished. Gone. Without a trace.

Meanwhile, we had become nomads as well. Back in America, we moved four times in six years before settling in Berkeley’s redwood-studded hills above the University of California campus, where both my mom and I enrolled, she in the School of Nutrition, I in the Near Eastern Studies Department. Kevin headed off to Harvard. Chris packed his bags for Cornell, and Rich chose Stanford. Later, seeking to be closer to Iran, I traveled to Egypt to study.

On my dust-coated balcony that overlooked the palm trees of the American University in Cairo, in 1978, I first heard the ominous news: BBC reports of riots and massacres crackled in from the provincial Iranian city of Tabriz. Students were demonstrating, government troops opening fire. Many lay dead, scores wounded. On Cairo’s hazy horizon, the red afternoon sun was setting behind the pyramids.

These warnings, like Cassandra’s, would fall on deaf ears. Diplomats ignored the signs. Martyrs would now be buried. The Shia forty-day mourning period passed, and then new protests ignited in Mashhad, Tehran, Isfahan. Bullets were said to have been fired into unarmed crowds. Mothers wept offstage. Iranians had finally lost their fear. A tidal wave no army could control rose up from this storm-blown ocean of resentment against the ancien régime. Soon this revolution would blow the Shah off his peacock throne along with his dazzling court of poseurs and sycophants. All would be swept away, stunning the world.

My brothers back in the States couldn’t believe or accept that the Iranian people had so drastically changed. The Islamic Republic was proclaimed and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini hailed as the Supreme Leader. Arrests filled the prisons. Revolutionary courts ordered the execution of traitors by firing squad. Factories, homes, land and private wealth were confiscated, sending thousands fleeing into exile.

Then, on November 4, 1979, hostage fever gripped America in a drama that would last 444 days. Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh’s nightly rhetorical games and Ted Koppel’s arching hairstyle became bizarre sources of fascination.

Refugees kept flooding out of Iran by air, sea, horseback and foot. A diaspora of a million Iranians was born. The Islamic Republic closed its borders. Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed America the Great Satan and Americans personae non gratae. Then a terrible war broke out. Saddam Hussein, without warning, invaded the southwest province. Iranian soldiers battled Iraqis in trenches and nerve-gas horror. Hundreds of thousands would die.

All our attempts to contact Hassan over the years had failed. A wall of silence had risen. He and his family had disappeared. Their fate was unknown. His young sons, Ali and Mahdi, had surely joined the war.

At night, I dreamt of pomegranate groves with blood-red fruit so ripe it burst its skin. Time passed. One decade, then another.

1.

Fellow Travelers

The start of a journey in Persia resembles an algebraical equation: it may or may not come out.

—ROBERT BYRON, THE ROAD TO OXIANA

In early April 1998, my family began our long-awaited journey back home. Not to our ancestral Ireland, but to Iran. While most Americans still recoiled with images of ranting hostage takers and wild-eyed terrorists, we put our fears aside. My three brothers and I, with our elderly parents, would cross the vast Iranian plateau on a blind search for Hassan, our lost friend and mentor who had taken care of us in Tehran so many years ago. Our seven-hundred-mile overland trek, from the ancient southern city of Shiraz, once called the Paris of Persia, all the way north to Tehran, the metropolis of modern Iran, would be a cross-cultural odyssey to rediscover a country, its people and our much-loved adopted Iranian family.

Journeys are often conceived in a miraculous split-second flash that illuminates the purpose and route of passage. Once the embryo forms, everything else falls into place in scattered pieces—visas and plane tickets, weathered maps, oblique itineraries—a jigsaw puzzle of fact and fantasy.

In early December 1997, my youngest brother, Richard, phoned me with surprising news from his home in Saudi Arabia. In the Gulf island state of Bahrain, he said, visas for Iran could be found. His voice, broken up by a poor connection, barked and echoed.

Just heard that ladies from Arabia-bia flew into Iran on a shopping binge. They landed in Isfahan, bought their carpets-pets and got out safely… a rug under each arm.

No!

Got their vi-sas… in Bahrain.

For how long?

Less than a week.

Any Americans?

"Don’t know. Tomorrow I’ll find out. So, baba, are you ready-eady to go back-ack?"

Mamma mia, I stammered.

Goo-ood. Great id-ea! Ask Mom and Dad… What about the whole family-mily?

His question fell through the receiver with the weight of heavy granite. The entire family?

A tough sell, I remarked.

No tougher-er than the Karakoram-ram.

After living in the Persian Gulf for eight years with his wife and two young boys, Richard had developed a thick skin. His baptism in Middle Eastern turbulence began in 1991. Overnight, Saddam Hussein’s army poured across the Saudi border into Kuwait, only to be stopped by an accidental and chaotic firefight in a small village called Khafji, a few hundred miles from Rich’s green suburban lawn in Dhahran. While his kids played in their treehouse, Scud missiles rained down.

For his latest vacation—Rich was an environmental geologist—he had climbed in Pakistan’s rugged Himalayas, the infamous Karakoram Range. His hiking trip swiftly turned into a feat of endurance. Halfway into the trek, his companion fell twenty feet onto a rock ledge, fracturing his leg. Single-handedly, Rich fashioned a leg splint, lifted him onto his shoulders and hauled him down to the Hunza Valley to be airlifted out. Rich had long before earned my admiration as a fearless, no-nonsense scientist. He was in love with nature’s geological wonders and was determined to witness each one in person. But Iran seemed daunting, as remote and impassable as his snowbound Karakoram peaks.

When I asked my brother Chris whether he would be coming along, he replied, Are you nuts?

For years, only the odd foreign journalist had dared venture into the somber Islamic Republic. News reports were dismal: Boys used as human minesweepers on the Iraqi front. Women trapped under black chadors. Clenched-fisted zealots led by mullahs in the ritual chant "Marg bar Amrika, Death to America." Cast as a pariah, Iran had been cut off from the world. All travelers except the foolhardy few kept a safe distance. And rightly so. This fundamentalist state had flogged offenders, covered women and defiantly thumbed its nose at the West. Yet there was reason to be upbeat: a moderate cleric had just been elected president.

Mohammad Khatami’s surprise landslide victory in August 1997 ushered in a new era. Many hailed this heady period as Tehran Spring. In a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour on January 7, 1998, President Khatami welcomed cultural exchange. He offered an olive branch to Washington for the first time